5 From RYaN to Reykjavik: The Role of Nuclear Weapons in Ending the Cold War Jacob W. Kipp At a time of increased tensions between Russia and the West over its annexation of Crimea and engagement in a bloody civil war in eastern Ukraine, it is right and appropriate to reflect upon the terrible tensions of the late Cold War at the end of 1970s and early 1980s. By ordering a strategic nuclear exercise during the current crisis President Vladimir Putin has sought to reassert the role of nuclear weapons as the defining element in strategic stability.1 Timed to begin on the day before “Victory Day,” May 9th, the exercise was intended to demonstrate Russia’s ability to defend its sovereignty and territorial integrity in case of a global, thermonuclear war. At the end of the exercise Putin noted: “We all had a chance to observe the high readiness and coherent grouping of the country’s strategic offensive and defensive forces.… This is a reliable guarantor of sover- eignty and territorial integrity of Russia and plays an essential role in ensuring global and regional security.”2 Today the nuclear arsenals are considerably small- er than three decades ago, but they still remain a defining element of national power. And operational strategic exercises involving nuclear forces reflect both readiness and not-too-subtle political signaling. But a Russo-Ukraine confron- Jacob W. Kipp, “From RYaN to Reykjavik: The Role of Nuclear Weapons in Ending the Cold War,” Essay, Enduring Legacy Project, John A. Adams ’71 Center for Mili- tary History & Strategic Analysis, Virginia Military Institute, 2014. 2 tation and the risks of nuclear war have been recognized since the end of the Cold War.3 Some experts see the situation as particularly threatening because of advances in nuclear weapons technology, including super EMP (electro-mag- netic pulse) weapons. Their employment could, according to Peter Pry, lead to a world war, involving the employment of nuclear weapons.4 Nuclear Weapons and the Cold War In that period three decades ago the nuclear arsenals of the two super powers greatly shaped their bilateral tensions and raised the prospect of the Cold War ending in a very hot nuclear exchange, which could, given the size of the ar- senals, destroy civilization and even threaten the existence of life on this plan- et.5 By 1980 the U.S. arsenal of nuclear warheads had declined from a peak of 32,450 in the mid-1960s to 24,300. American warheads had gotten smaller and more accurate. The Soviet Union over the same period had reached nuclear parity with the United States—and continued to grow its nuclear arsenal until 1985 when it possessed over 44,000 warheads and had a significant advantage in throw-weight. By 1983 scientists in United States and Soviet Union had come to the same ominous conclusion. As Carl Sagan stated: The delicate ecological relations that bind together organisms on Earth in a fabric of mutual dependency would be torn, perhaps irreparably. There is little question that our global civilization would be destroyed. The human population would be reduced to prehistoric levels, or less. Life for any survivors would be extremely hard.6 By that stage of the Cold War the size and capabilities of each arsenal had turned such weapons into means of strategic deterrence without any effective role in war-fighting to achieve political ends. But each side feared the other’s ability to engage in a disarming first strike, which would leave the attacked power incapable of retaliation. Secrecy, distrust and apprehension regarding the intentions of the other side kept the arsenals on full-time alert in case the opponent might just take some insane risk and use such weapons. ABM defense of the two sides had been limited by the ABM Treaty of 1972 to one national sight each. The United States invested in the protection of its land-based ballis- tic missiles at Grand Forks Air Force Base, North Dakota, with the ABM sys- 3 tem operational for only two years in 1975-1976. The Soviets placed their ABM system around Moscow in an effort to protect national command authority. Both systems were unable to deal with the offensive challenge created by MIRV technology.7 This situation turned MAD into the national security strategy by default, precisely when both super powers had to confront serious and com- plex international crisis, affecting their alliance systems and raising the issue of the relationship among conventional military power, theater nuclear forces, and strategic nuclear forces. In Washington there were those who were certain that detente or “the relaxation of international tensions” had advanced Soviet interests at the expense of the United States and were quite sure that the USSR was preparing to fight and win a nuclear war. Albert Wohlsetter had raised the issue in 1974 and criticized the CIA’s National Intelligence Estimates on Soviet nuclear capabilities. At the end of the Gerald Ford administration, the newly appointed CIA director, George H. W. Bush, authorized a competitive analytical exercise pitting the CIA’s analysts against a team of outside experts, known to be “hawks” on the Soviet threat. Team B concluded that the CIA had been wrong in their assessment of the USSR’s capabilities and intentions, seeing more defensive motives than strategic offensive plans in their actions and accrediting to the USSR a massive capability for defense research and develop- ment and weapons procurement.8 The political consequences of Team B were to raise the charge of “dovishness” against CIA’s own analysts while promoting an alternative vision, noted for its avowed “hawkishness” toward the Soviet Union and its leadership.9 This dispute over intelligence in 1976 had deep roots in U.S. policy towards the Soviet Union during World War II and the Cold War. Cold War Strategy: Containment vs. Rollback and the Role of Military Power For well over three decades the United States and the Soviet Union had been locked in a competition to define which power would dominate the internation- al order that emerged after World War II. The United States was the great engine of a democratic-capitalist order based upon the rule of law and global markets. World War II had been the good war for a generation of Americans coming out of the Great Depression and mobilizing for warfare across the globe. The Roo- sevelt administration had gambled in its national strategy by emphasizing the creation of naval and air power to project across the globe while relying upon Lend Lease to keep foreign allied armies in the field against the Germans and 4 Japanese. That gamble had by 1944-1945 had paid off in the defeat of Germany, but it had meant that one allied army, the Red Army, was reshaping the map of Europe to include much of Eastern Europe into a de facto sphere of influence for the USSR. Already by the fall of 1944, after the Soviet failure to intervene to support the Warsaw Uprising led by elements of the Polish Resistance loyal to the Government of Poland in exile, Britain’s Imperial General Staff was treating the USSR as a potential adversary following the end of the war in Europe.10 In May 1945 Churchill had ordered the Imperial General Staff to do a study of a possible war over Germany starting on 1 July 1945 and pitting the armed forces of the United Kingdom and the United States with assistance from rearmed Wehrmacht divisions and Free Polish divisions against the Red Army. The staff officers’ conclusions were pessimistic about the outcome of such a war, and they labeled the exercise Operation Unthinkable. By late May Churchill knew that the chance of any such operation was over as American troops began to leave Europe for the Pacific.11 The United States with its concerns for ending the war against Japan at that time saw the USSR as a vital ally and had agreed at Yalta to provide Lend Lease assistance to the USSR to ensure a Soviet force of 60 divisions would strike Japanese forces in Manchuria three months after the end of the war in Europe.12 American pragmatism had downplayed profound difference between the An- glo-American Allies and Stalin’s Soviet Union during the war in Europe. But following the death of Franklin D. Roosevelt in April 1945, the Harry S. Tru- man administration began a reassessment of U.S.-Soviet relations. When the war in the Pacific ended with the use of two atomic bombs and Soviet offensive in Manchuria, Washington had not yet adopted Churchill’s dark view of Stalin’s empire-building, but the direction of relations moved steadily toward giving up on the wartime alliance serving as the basis for future positive relations.13 Seek- ing a stable post-war order under the auspices of the United Nations, Washing- ton saw the USSR as practicing revolutionary politics, anti-imperialism, and sphere-of-interest diplomacy with the objective of Soviet hegemony across Eu- rope and Asia. Moscow understood its own weakness as a result of its territory being the chief battleground for total war and the accompanying loss of lives and material goods. The geo-strategic dilemma which would shape military-po- litical relations between Washington and Moscow during the Cold War can be understood by asking a seemingly absurd question: who would win a battle be- tween a whale and an elephant? The answer, of course, depends upon just where that battle would be fought, on the ocean or the steppe.14 Some later came to 5 think that nuclear weapons had made such a war an irrational choice.15 In the absence of a Soviet atomic bomb in 1945, Stalin set out to get one as rapidly as possible while convincing Washington that the Soviet Union would not be intimidated.16 In the absence of a common threat, the differences between Washington and Moscow seemed monumental.